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Having briefly mentioned Craig Gibson in our round up of the Photographers’ Gallery’s Fresh-Faced + Wild-Eyed show, we felt the Scottish photographer deserved a little bit more attention. Born After Birth is a project that explores the mysterious world of adult baptism in the Baptist Church community. Craig succeeds in taking a relatively weighty subject and presenting it in an accessible way. The imagery is documented sincerely avoiding dramatising what he sees. Craig also printed the series as an A5 zine, which gives the project a different dimension and alludes to the privacy within this concealed part of society by containing it in a small, hand-held object.

Not only is Rune Fisker one half of the independent animation studio he started with his brother, Benny Box, but when he’s not storyboarding, focusing on character design or working on title sequences for TV and advertising, the Danish Design School graduate is busy building a portfolio of distinctive drawings. Working mostly in black and white with occasional experiments in colour, each of his illustrations is like its own self-contained world where strange, suited figures with shadowed faces struggle through tilting angles and windswept interiors. The Copenhagen-based illustrator’s angular style puts an emphasis on line, playing with geometry and shading for his chaotic but clean compositions, and with their elongated shadows and strangely placeless settings, Rune’s drawings remind me of Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s haunting paintings.

If you remember Hunting for Hockney, a gentle, reflective ode to grief and to the Yorkshire moors created by Alice Dunseath a while back, I’d put money on you being equally enamoured by the newest piece to emerge from her audiovisually inclined brain. Entitled You Could Sunbathe in This Storm, the film is a mixed media animation “where space, forms, colours and sounds symbolise a recognisable world,” she says. “New beginnings put an end to familiar patterns and the viewer is left to wonder whether they shape as much as they are shaped.” As a gently rustling soundtrack lulls you into a sense of security, and a man’s timeworn voice reads out a section of The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water by W.B. Yeats, you find yourself slowly slipping into an endlessly tactile, subtly meditative alternative reality. Unsurprisingly, it’s been doing the rounds at film festivals and gallery screenings this summer – I can only imagine what it looks like projected to the size of a small house and watched in a dark room with the volume turned right up.

Jack Fletcher’s work caught our eye at Edinburgh University’s stand at D&AD New Blood, thanks to its mixture of strange subject matter, bold colours and traditional woodcut technique. His skill with composition makes for clean imagery that fuses tradition with modernity, whether it’s depicting witches or prospectors. Alongside creating gorgeous 2D works, Jack has also turned his skilled hands to creating 3D works from his prints, taking elements from screen prints, cutting them out and layering them into neat narratives. Each work manages to tell a story, and we reckon with skills like this young Jack will go far.

We’ve been extolling the virtues of graphic designer Sean Freeman since way back in 2008 when some of you were likely still in short trousers and I was at university saying pretentious things about poems I’d half-cribbed from York Notes. In all that time our love for his work hasn’t faded, and while seven years ago we were content to devote just 11 words to Sean, today we’ll dedicate a few more to him to bring you some great recent work.

Spanish studio Clase bcn was tasked with creating the promotional material for The Palau de la Música Catalana’s 2015-2016 season and the result is a playful but refined identity. Encompassing the building’s grandeur, huge banners line the corridors of the concert hall, showcasing the events and people appearing at the Palau, tying them together with a border of lush colours to echo the hall’s eclectic programme. Made up of fragmented shapes the boarder has been translated wonderfully into the other areas of the identity, appearing in milky-coloured pamphlets and a sturdy book.

“It’s a funny thing actually,” Tony Brook tells me, pointing to a series of three posters which have been reprinted especially for design studio Spin’s new exhibition, which opens today. “I was saying this morning to the guys who were putting the show up, when we first made those posters they all just went. 125, bang! Immediately! And we thought that was what would happen every time, because we’d never made anything before. We were disabused of that illusion fairly quickly.”

Book giant Taschen is publishing a glorious new book that explores the 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it’s been designed by M/M making it that little bit more special. The film completely revolutionised the sci-fi genre, and this book takes an in-depth look at the lead actors, production designers and special-effects guys. Written by Piers Bizony, the book wouldn’t be complete without an insight into the brains behind the whole operation, writer Arthur C Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick, with their creative processes revealed.

Hello and welcome to the new look It’s Nice That. Just over eight years ago we launched the first ever version of It’s Nice That. What started as a response to a university brief has seen many changes and iterations in its steady growth, and internally we’re referring to this redesign as version five – the most recent big change to the site being back in April 2012. A lot has changed since then and this redesign sees not only a change to our look and feel but also our editorial structure.

Sometimes it takes somebody popping an A4-sized frame around a curious arrangement of objects lying on the side to make you realise how picturesque everyday situations can appear. Such is the case for Clotilde Viannay, a Paris-based designer and the art director of L’Incroyable magazine who has taken to illustrating sweet, surreal collections of objects in coloured pencil, in a style reminiscent of assemblage and Dalì-esque landscapes. It’s miles away from her everyday work, but as side projects go Clotilde’s still lifes make for a super charming collection.

We’ve helped you put together a portfolio; held your hand as you navigate the “agent or no agent” debate and made you see what you and your work are worth. Now that you’re free to think about all the fun things like invoicing, tax and paper stock, it’s time to reflect. For the final article in our series of advice for graduates, we asked some established creatives to look back on their time at art school and tell us what they wish they’d been taught. Hopefully it’ll help assuage some of your concerns as you emerge into the big, brilliant world of a career in the creative industries.

“Inspiration comes from cinema and cinematic photographers,” Nadia Lee Cohen, the 24-year-old photographer whose vibrant pseudo-sinister work has been ricocheting around the internet of late, tells us. “Anything focusing around suburbia with dark undertones usually has me sold.”

Annual reports aren’t the most exciting sounding of entities, but in the right hands, they can certainly become beautiful. Take Manchester agency Music’s designs for the British Fashion Council’s 2014/15 annual review. With an all-black cover, gorgeous imagery and bold typography, you’d do well to tell it apart from a slick coffee table tome. The book showcases the BFC’s “five strategic pillars”, according to Music; Business, Education, Innovation & Digital, Investment and Reputation, with imagery from events including London Fashion Week, the British Fashion Awards and London Collections Men.

It goes without saying that we receive more information from screens than we do from paper. But posters are such a superb platform for graphic design experimentation that they seem unlikely to become obsolete. Instead, they’re adapting, and a wonderful example of that shapeshifting is in the smart moving posters of agency Wonder Room. The man behind them is Steve Hockett, who made them in response to seeing his poster designs diluted for online platforms.